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I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
The short version of that being that pedestrians are special snowflakes who won't walk unless the built environment is just right. Meanwhile, looking at your Sioux Falls shot, the issue isn't so much "dignity" as scale. Well, that, and the fact that no one wants to walk to car dealerships. The blocks are about 0.5 mile x 1 mile. If you want to have a pancake breakfast and then head over to pick up your new handgun, that's over a 20 minute walk. It's not a matter of dignity or respect. Making the walk nicer isn't going to make it take less time.
While I lean towards defending the car culture side in the overall debate, I think I'd soften that a bit. See how much the car drivers moan when they have to wade into an environment that actually does favor pedestrians and transit at a large scale, like Manhattan. Are the car drivers special snowflakes who hate to drive unless they have massive free parking lots everywhere, lots of wide-open 45mph multilane roads, and very few pesky pedestrians who have a tendency to go every which way on a whim?
I'd say more neutrally that the desires of drivers and pedestrians are fundamentally at odds with each other. A large-scale environment that's great for walking, like good enough that Sam the Stockbroker in Manhattan, who makes enough to keep a BMW in a private garage, chooses to walk and take the train to his job anyways because it's easier and better, will inevitably be bad for cars, due to expensive and scarce parking, slow and narrow streets, and pedestrians going every which way. Meanwhile, if it's great for driving, it will suck for walking, because of the huge parking lots, huge distances between things, and narrow and poorly maintained sidewalks with intimidating high-speed car traffic only a few feet away. My overall point is more that any environment that favors one or the other cannot be changed to be the other way without basically demolishing the entire city and rebuilding everything differently.
Car drivers dont want to go to Manhattan at all. No one doe, really. They are forced to because its a place with concentrated economic opportunities.
Manhattan has an awful lot of $500/month+ parking spaces for a place nobody wants to drive to. And an awful lot of $2k/month and up (way, way up) apartments for a place nobody wants to live in. The oddball hoops you have to jump through to get a rental there suggest that the number of people who very badly want to live there and are willing to pay out the nose for the privilege remain quite high.
I don't think it's that controversial of a statement to say that people who like urban spaces really like them and are willing to pay and make other sacrifices to live there (small spaces and lots of possibly annoying neighbors nearby), and people who like rural spaces also really like them and are willing to make different sacrifices to live there (nothing close by, moderate drive to get to 1 or 2 small grocery stores, hardware stores, bars, etc and maybe very long drive to get to any more or bigger of the above).
There are people who like it, a small amount. There are a greater number of people who like not having to drive to their job because it is so close. The people driving there don't want to be there at all, they wish they could magic their office to a different location not in Manhattan.
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